Museum Night Bern 2024

Significance and diversity of the Ernst Gosteli Collection

Last year, the SAPA Foundation received an important collection of theater postcards. This will be presented to the public for the first time at the Bern Museum Night - in the presence of its collector Ernst Gosteli, who is well known to the Bernese public as co-founder and long-time co-director of the Theater an der Effingerstrasse.

Introduced in 1869 in Austria-Hungary with the name Correspondence Postcard, the later picture postcard enjoyed growing popularity until it was slowly replaced by electronic means of communication at the beginning of the new millennium.

The exhibition, curated by Martin Dreier, shows selected postcards in their original format, which, starting from the first municipal theater in Bern, builds a bridge to the rest of Switzerland and also presents curiosities from all over the world.

The exhibition is complemented by a 15-minute film presentation that explains the background to the collection and the medium of the postcard and portrays its collectors.

Audience discussion with Ernst Gosteli

Martin Dreier, curator of the exhibition and former director of the Swiss Theater Collection, talks to Ernst Gosteli about his passion for collecting - fellow collectors, those who want to become collectors and other interested parties are welcome.

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The Ernst Gosteli: Theater Postcards documentation fund consists of 2187 theater postcards collected by Ernst Gosteli over the course of time. They are recorded in the Swiss Performing Arts Platform database and can be consulted on site in a FileMaker database.